It's great to have brothers

And sometimes, if you're really lucky, your brothers are engaged or married to top class birds who are like real sisters to you.

And you can go and stay with one of those brothers and his bird in Glasgow, and you can meet up with the others and friends you met at the wedding, and laugh your ass off for an entire weekend.

What's also great is if you have Internet friends you've never met before, who, when you do meet them, seem to be more like great mates from college you knew really well then but just haven't seen for a long time.

And another great thing is when you meet your other Internet friends who you have met before, and they continue to be top class fun and you just hang out in one of those fantastic high-ceilinged Glasgow flats and play Wii and have a great time.

What's not great (in case you thought my brain had gone overly soft) is when you sit for about three hours in a freezing cold venue and discover that your top class comedian brother has been stuck on a bill with the kind of comics you would expect to see at Butlins or similar.

Sleety snow is no picnic either (I fully expect a hollow laugh from Queenie here). Nor is coming home to a house empty of all animals except the goldfish, who don't form much of a welcoming committee, bless them.

But we're all here now, and I'm going to tuck into the final Harry Potter book tonight.

Look upon me in shame, Dubliners...

...for today I have truly become a culchie.

First, let me say that this story starts with "there is a woman who walks her dog on the beach...", a phrase that usually means a bad story is coming. Today though, there is no bad story.

There is a woman who walks her dog on the beach, who we often meet. Her dog is called Indy, and she is a german shepherd lurcher, who is still only really a puppy, although, in the time we've known her, she's gone from being smaller than Milo to being bigger than Cody, and she still has some growing to do. Anyway, Indy loves to run after Milo and Cody and their ball, and they've now become so familiar to her that she will run across half a mile of beach to meet them, and her owner follows after her and we meet for a chat.

Today, the tide was out and there were no boy racers around and the wind had abated somewhat and there was this big yellow god in the sky, warming us. So we tootled up the beach and chatted about dogs and living here and our cars being broken into and set on fire and so on, but it wasn't moaning, it was just chat. And I found that I was asking her a lot of questions. Her name. What she does for a living. Whether she commutes to Dublin or to Dundalk (which are your two main options here). Where she lives exactly. And so on. And I realised that I was behaving like someone not from Dublin. And I wonder now if she thinks I'm nosey.

Maybe I'll ask her next time I see her.

Shout out

I'd just like to say to StevieB, RayC, Dr. Groove, and LukeM, that I hope you're all happy. I have, today, missed an entire whole day of work because I was watching The Wire.

A whole day.

You sure are some burdensome friends.

Birfday!

I had a lovely day today, thanks. Mister Monkey brought me an omelette, bagel, coffee, and juice up to bed this morning, and put some Prince on the stereo to remind me that I am going to see Prince in June. This is great news, because I couldn't decide whether or not to go to the concert. We love Prince, but we're not so crazy about huge outdoor gigs, and neither, we seem to remember, is Prince. Nevertheless, his greatest hits gigs in London were supposed to be spectacular, and if this really is the last chance ever to see him perform things like "Raspberry Beret" and "Sign Special O the Times", then I would be an idiot to pass it up. Now that Mister Monkey has bought the ticket for me, the decision is made.

In related news, I feel terribly old. Fortunately, I feel terribly old and drunk on champagne, which is at least some reminder of the fineness of the life I live.

Havers!

ComedyB met a well-known English actor lady recently, who told him he looked awfully like Havers. I think she may have said it more than once.

Now, every time I see Havers, all I can think of is saying "Havers!" in a plummy voice.

Marvellous.

Chariots of Fire is on right now, while I'm having my tea, so I get to think "Havers!" to myself a lot while eating my orange.

The Savages

This is a film about two adult siblings (Laura Linney and Phillip Seymour Hoffman) who are a bit messed up and kind of rubbish, and the call that they get one day that results in them having to put their father (Philip Bosco) in a nursing home. I think people might be staying away from this film because they think it's going to be about older people with dementia, but it isn't really. The dad has only a minor role (although Philip Bosco is fantastic). Really it's a film about the siblings having to learn to be grown up, and having to deal with their pasts without wallowing in them. I really enjoyed its slightness and lightness of touch, and the fact that it dealt with a number of issues that, in other hands, could have been appallingly mawkish and touchy-feely and huggy-learny. Instead, the Savage sibs learn a little, and hug a little, but in a way that feels more real than in other movies.

I really enjoyed this film.

Also, hats off to the young man who was working at the box office. While I was waiting for S, a woman went up to the box office to ask what films were about to start. "Well, there's The Savages," he said.
"What's that about?" she asked him.
He told her what it was about. Then he said, "there's also Margot at the Wedding."
"And what's that about?"
"It's shit."
"Right. I'll have a ticket for The Savages, then."
That's the kind of service you need more of in Irish cinemas, I think.

The prominent Irish monuments weekend

At the weekend, our pals Aldo and F were over from the Big Island, because why not, right? In the past, this is the kind of weekend I've always slightly dreaded. What the hell do you do with people who come over the for the weekend? Where do you bring them, how do you entertain them?

It turns out what you do, especially if your friends are staying in the Mespil, is go to Birchalls in Ranelagh on the Friday night. Then, if you are us, you get back into town way too early for your bus and go to the Gresham for a cocktail while you wait (at €5.15 for a pint of booze drink, it's far too expensive, but is at least comfy and warm and not full of wankers at 10.30 on a Friday, which is a big deal). Then you leave them to their own devices on the Saturday, and have them come out to your house on Sunday morning on the excellent Matthews coach service.

At 9.40, we met them off the bus and went down the beach with the dogs, who were their usual stand-offish selves. We had a stroll around in the freezing cold, then came back to the house and had happy breakfast, before piling into the car and setting off to Newgrange. Aldo and F got on a tour immediately, and we hung about the centre. We found a comfy bench in the sun and out of the wind to sit on, and we watched the Boyne go by and smiled at the tourists and generally had a cheery morning. The tea is terrible in the visitors' centre, but the cake is lovely. If you're bringing visitors and not planning to go to Newgrange yourself, though, I'm not sure you really need to see the exhibition. Certainly we paid it little attention as we walked round it, because Aldo and F go to this kind of monument all the time, so they were able to tell us things that weren't written on the posters.

After that, we paid a visit to Mellifont Abbey, where some guys in their twenties, pissed off that our arrival meant they couldn't freely throw stones at each other any more, left. We wandered around there and saw the stones and drank in the quiet and examined an early wasp before getting back in the car to go to Monasterboice to look at the round tower and the high crosses. Monasterboice is great, because the graveyard is still in use, so there's a feeling of it being a proper centre of the community, despite the fact that there are very few houses around the place. The tower and the crosses and the rookery are all atmospheric and creepy and olde worlde and the view of the countryside around is relatively unobstructed by Southfork-style ranch houses. By then, though, it was absolutely freezing, so it was home for a bit of vegetable soup and more coffee and a bit of a sit round in the warm before putting the others on the bus again.

Not a very exciting story, you might think. But it's interesting to me, as someone who has, almost all her life, lived in an area that people come to visit, to have places I can bring people. It gives me more confidence when I say "you should come and visit us", because I know there is stuff on offer that you will like. Of course it helps if, like the Aldos, you are fun and happy to go along with whatever entertainments are presented to you, and you like both dogs and cats.

So, you should come and visit us.

Edited to add: Excitingly, Aldo has come up with a real product that Mister Monkey can put up on the Slard website: chocolate-covered bacon.

Back to the shop

Yesterday I had my first ever shift as a volunteer in the bookshop on Parliament St. It was a pleasant afternoon, featuring nice chat with tourists, someone still looking for the Viking Museum despite the fact that I think it got rolled into Dublinia (must check this; people will ask me this every week from now till November), and a few young lads who tried halfheartedly to rob the till and get into the back room. Thanks to the managements' new (or since my time, anyway) security procedures, however, their efforts were fruitless. Take that, tossers (or rather don't).

Books bought: JPod by Douglas Coupland, which is kind of annoying and trying too hard, and Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra, which was recommended to me last summer by Queenie. Result.

A public plea to the people who run the Irish Entrepreneur of the Year Awards

Please stop playing your poxy ad on the radio. Please. Please stop it. It's on every hour during Morning Ireland, and has been for what feels like over a year. Will you just be running it continuously now, forever? Well, please don't. We're sick of it. We couldn't give a fuck about entrepreneurs. In fact, we hate them now, thanks to you. If one my friends suggested to me that they were thinking of entering this award, I would hate them forever.

Just stop. Really. Stop.


Seriously. I'm not messing.

Check out my IT guy's mad skillz!

Look!

http://www.accentmonkey.com/

Mad!

health check

A couple of conversations I had at the Monkey Parents' 40th anniversary party at the weekend suggested that a) more people read my blog than I thought and b) that I scared the bejesus out of some people by my post about my panic attack.

The follow-up, then, is that I started taking anti-depressants, and now I feel much better. In fairness, there's a chance that simply admitting I was having anxiety issues in the first place might have made me feel better, but despite a recently-published study that suggests they don't work, the anti-depressants feel to me like they're working. Interestingly, according to Bad Science editor Ben Goldacre, the really interesting finding of that study is not that anti-depressants don't work (apparently that's not really what it says), but that drug companies continue to bury the studies they don't like, and are able to get away with it.

In any case, I only intend to take them for a few months in order to get my act together a bit. I'm thinking of trying cognitive behavioral therapy. It seems like a good time.

Rawr! (do not read if you have not seen Cloverfield)

Here are some things I really liked about Cloverfield:

It's short, and it cuts out all that crappy character development and hugging and learning that really messes up otherwise perfectly good monster movies.

It's loud enough all the way through that even if people are talking in the cinema, you can't hear them.

It's very exciting and genuinely bloody scary. It's also kind of sad. The party scene at the beginning is only short, but it's well written and well acted enough that you accept the basic niceness of the characters. Also, the fact that Robert goes through all that stuff to get to Beth makes you think that maybe, just maybe, they might get away with it, although you know they won't, because of the movie you're watching.

I also love the modernity of it. In the early days of movies, certain signifiers had to be included in order to make films easier for people to follow. If someone was leaving one location to go to another, you would have to see them leave, then see them travel, then see them arrive, because otherwise the audience would be confused about where it was or what was going on. The increased sophistication of audiences is something that Abrams's team has played with in their major TV shows: in Alias, they switched from one place to another with very little explanation of what was going on a lot of the time; in Lost, they switch between the present, the past, and the future with very little warning; in both cases, they simply rely on the audience to keep up or not care that they can't keep up. Cloverfield is the same. Why is there a monster? Don't know don't care. Where did all the other people from the party go? Don't know don't care. How did they get off the Brooklyn Bridge so fast, considering it looked so crowded? Don't know don't... actually, Mister Monkey did wonder about that a little bit.

What they've done is create the spine of a story, and rather than flesh it out themselves, they're going to let everyone who comes along later do that. In a similar fashion to the Max Brooks zombie books, I'm sure there'll be a massive outpouring of Cloverfield spinoff projects that will show up everywhere. It could be really good.

They also resisted the urge to throw in some monster movie tropes, despite setting the scene for them so clearly. Listing building with gaping open windows looking down toward the ground? Surely a great excuse for a fire, or rescuing a child, or a puppy. But there was nothing. Scrambling across the roof with the monster only blocks away? Surely someone is going to end up dangling off the building in a moment or two. Nope. No time, no time.

Also, some critics have complained about it playing on people's memories of 9/11 by using the images of frightened New Yorkers, covered in dust and milling about, as part of its scare tactics. But isn't that kind of what a good monster movie is supposed to do?

Here are some things I didn't really like about it:

The camerawork did give me the nausea a little bit (although that was maybe a function of the enormous, delicious, and hastily eaten Chinese meal that took place beforehand).

I couldn't understand why, the instant the monster hove into view, the women all turned into useless eejits while the men (one of whom, let's not forget, had been in love with the same woman for years and years and never managed to cowboy up and do anything about it) suddenly became all decisive and brave. Other people also have some race issues with the film (where are all the black people at? Oh, they're looting the electronics store), so maybe the movie could have less hidebound in both of those directions.

Sadly, I probably don't ever need to see it again, except out of pure academic interest. But it was a really enjoyable experience. I thoroughly appreciated the way they ended it with the scenes at Coney Island as well, given that the film is more like a fairground ride than anything else.

Eventful week!

So, where were we?

Well, after last week's exciting panic attack in the car, I went to the doctor and we had a long talk, and now I'm taking anti-depressants for a few months in order to get myself together a bit. So far I can honestly say that I've failed to exhibit any of the potentially terrifying side effects that I was told to expect, but I am a bit giddy and quite anxious a lot of the time. Also very sleepy. I believe this is similar to the way that antibiotics make you feel sicker before you start to feel better.

Then, on Friday morning, I had a run-in with my archnemesis. Her dog followed me again, like it sometimes does, and she went off to park somewhere far away, expecting it to run back to her. Except that she had parked out of sight, and the dog didn't see where she'd gone, so it didn't know where to run to, so it just followed me, with Milo and Cody barking at it the whole time (they're not as crazy about other dogs running up to them uninvited as they used to be when they were younger).

When I got back to my car, she was parked next to it, texting away on her phone and making no attempt at all to look for her dog. So I put my two in my car, went over to her, and said, "you know anything could happen to your dog while he's down the beach on his own and you're up here." She assured me, in the snobbiest voice possible (she actually said "Oh no, I can assure you...") that he would not bother anyone, nor get into a fight with another dog. She considered my suggestion that all anyone had to do was throw him a piece of cheese and steal him completely laughable (she fake laughed at it), despite the fact that he is a pure bred, unneutered boxer.

Finally I said "well, the fact is that according to the law the dog is supposed to be under your control, and if you can't even see him, then he can't be under your control, can he? So maybe you should get out of your car occasionally and walk him."

She then informed me that she was very lucky, because she doesn't need to walk. I, on the other hand, clearly do, because I look like some kind of Michelin man. She then suggested that perhaps her dog liked me so much because he "obviously likes the smell". She invited me to call both the guards and the dog warden on her, and offered me her mobile phone number so I could be sure to get the details right.

The problem is that I can't call the dog warden, or even the guards. Everyone on that beach walks their dog off the lead, and several people walk restricted breeds off the lead, and certainly unmuzzled, so we'd all be looking at fines if the dog warden started showing up, and nobody wants that. In general, everyone knows which dogs get along and which ones don't, and we stay out of each other's way when necessary and everyone tries not to be a nuisance to everyone else, and it's all pretty peaceful. What can you do when one person just insists on ruining that setup for everyone else?

I don't think she would even care if I did steal her dog. Which, by the way, I am very tempted to do.

Anyway, then last night me and Mam went to salsa, which turned out to be really good fun and the least intimidating exercise/dance class that I've ever attended. Mam came and got me so I didn't have to drive on the motorway, so it was okay. Since I started the medication I've only been driving short distances, because I kind of forget what I'm doing a little bit sometimes. I'm not sure I'm ready for the motorway just yet.

Lousy start to the week

Last night, astute readers may remember, I was due to go to salsa class with Mam. Unfortunately this didn't happen, because I had a panic attack in the car on the motorway on the way there and had to turn around and come back. This was incredibly frightening, because my foot just lodged itself onto the accelerator and I couldn't slow down, and the car managed to get itself up to 130 kph, and I was hyperventilating and felt like I was on the verge of fainting (I've never fainted, so I don't really know if this was likely to happen or not) and couldn't figure out what to do, when the exit for Balbriggan loomed up in front of me and I was able to turn the wheel and get off, and the act of turning the wheel kind of freed up my foot to move to the brake, and I calmed down a bit.

Except of course then I went into shock, and had the slightly comic experience of sitting in crappy rush hour traffic in Balbriggan with tears streaming down my face, listening to some bloke on Matt Cooper's show talking about Cork GAA players and watching the traffic jam and thinking Jesus, imagine living as far out as Balbriggan and still having to cope with rush hour traffic.

Anyway, I got home okay and Mam came and sat with me and Mister M came home and it was all fine and we decided that I'm not going mental at all, sure, everyone has panic attacks now and then.

And now I have a monstrous toothache.

It is a bit of a shit start to the week. So, let's play Things to Look Forward to:
1) I have almost acquired Season One of The Wire, so we can finally see if it's as good as everyone says it is (I really hope it is).
2) Lost on Sunday. But not just Lost, oh no. HIGH DEFINITION Lost. You can come and watch it if you want, but you have to be very quiet and watch out for panicking motorists on the motorway.
3) Being a bit pissed off is always a good excuse to post a picture of Naveen. So here he is.

Are you anticipating?

(If you don't understand the picture, then you are not anticipating.)

WTF? Heath Ledger's dead!

So weird. Early reports suggest some kind of overdose. He never seemed particularly strange, did he?

He was only 28, too. Poor lad.

No Country for Old Men

Bless the IFI. They may like to keep their cinemas incredibly stuffy, and there's no leg room at all if you slump down in the seat low enough to actually rest your head on the back of it, but at least they had a lovely clean print of the film and the place was reasonably quiet. This is, as Ray pointed out, crucial to your enjoyment of this terse, spare, movie.

The plot concerns a man (Josh Brolin) who finds some money in the desert. Other men (Javier Bardem, Woody Harrelson, some random Mexicans) are looking for the money, so now they are looking for the man who found the money. One of these men (Javier Bardem) is a little more determined than the others, and is also a total psychopath. A chase ensues. Tommy Lee Jones is also there.

The first 4/5ths of the film are basically amazing. The domestic chat between Josh Brolin and his wife, Kelly McDonald, is beautiful; the way he goes about finding the money and dealing with what he's found is so clinical and everyday; everything--the amount of dialogue, the level at which it's spoken, the amount of movement exhibited by each of the characers--is dialled down to the bare minimum: there is a tool for getting this job done, and that tool is sparsity.

The problem is, though, that the film doesn't want to stop there. As Mister M points out, it suffers from the modern movie drawback of having too many endings. He also tells me that the book is the same, so it's not like the Coen brothers arsed it up or anything. The story stops, but the film carries on past it. This would be really annoying, except that Barry Corbin turns up at the very end, and everyone loves him, right?

Apparently the ending has sparked some debate, over what the film is really about, and who the main character is. Is the film centered on Javier Bardem vs. Josh Brolin, and should it therefore end when their story ends? Or is it about Tommy Lee Jones, in which case, should it end with the end of his story?

It's a valid question, and in theory I like the idea of the action-based story being a single event in a larger story, but I'm not sure it really works in practice, because it does just add time to what is already a long and intense evening in the pictures.

Still, it's pleasant to see a film that's worth a little bit of debate. Also, Texas looks wonderfully bleak in it, and I haven't seen anything so beautifully shot since Brokeback Mountain. Solid stuff.

All the Pretty Horses

Not read, but listened to, which still counts for the purposes of the New Year's resolution. I recently upgraded my eMusic account to include audiobooks, and have recently started listening to them while I try to tire the cat out in the mornings so I can get some work done.

This is an abridged version of All the Pretty Horses, read by Brad Pitt. He's an excellent reader for Cormac McCarthy, because he has that young but weary tone to his voice, which is ideal for telling the story of young men who cross the border from Texas into Mexico looking for work and getting into serious and grim trouble. This story has all the hallmarks of a Cormac McCarthy book (Note: I have never read a Cormac McCarthy book, I'm just going on what people tell me), including horses, trekking across inhospitable landscapes, feelings of loss and loneliness, and extreme and random violence. It's a pretty compelling story, and I'm looking forward to listening to the other two books in the trilogy, which are also available on eMusic for one audiobook credit. Pretty good value, I think.

God, this post really reads like one of those fake ones that people are paid to write to big something up, doesn't it?

The Office

Forgive me for being late to the party, but I've just started watching NBC's The Office on Paramount. Because they're showing two episodes a night and the first season is only six episodes long, I have missed the entire first season and came in at the fourth episode of season two. I liked it just fine; the characters are pleasant and the whole show is less cringey and comedy-of-embarrassment than the original version, so the fact that I wasn't laughing at it didn't bother me.

Last night, though, they showed "Take Your Daughter to Work Day", and either the characters have finally clicked with me, or it was genuinely a much funnier episode, because I laughed until I was almost sick. It feels a little like when The Simpsons finally realised that Homer rather than Bart was the star of the show; The Office seems to have figured out that, unlike the British version of the show, the will-they-won't-they relationship and the overpowering manager figure are not the centre of the show. The centre of the show is Dwight. I hope it keeps up like this.

Also, the great thing about watching it on Paramount is that I'll be able to catch all the episodes I missed when they run them again in a couple of weeks time. The only thing is that you can never, ever sit through the ad breaks on Paramount unless you want to see the same ad for Everybody Loves Raymond, That 70s Show, or some random bloody Lee Evans or Al Murray thing over and over again, every break, every show, forever.

The trouble with movies

Next week, all things being equal, Mister Monkey and I will take our first trip to the cinema in about three months. We never go to the cinema anymore, because I hate it, for reasons with which you will be well acquainted if you have ever met me.

However, I have agreed to go and see No Country for Old Men, the new Coen brothers movie, with Mister M next week. Mister M is a big Cormac McCarthy fan, and we both love the Coen brothers, even if there is some division in the Monkey House over what constitutes a great Coen brothers movie

(The Hudsucker Proxy is a bad one. Hey! It's my blog.)

One the one hand, I'm kind of excited to see this film. Who doesn't love a critically acclaimed new Coen brothers movie? Many of my friends whose tastes in film I would endorse say it is great. Also, you can never have too much Kelly McDonald in films, nor Barry Corbin neither.

BUT! It could be really boring. A few people have said it was really boring, and the comparisons that people make with Blood Simple (a Coen brothers film I have to admit I find, well, a little boring) make me suspicious of it. Also, I don't like Javier Bardem. Like, really, in an irrational way don't like him.

We shall see.

Post-op smidger update

It seems to be safe to leave her alone for hours at a time now, without me worrying what that crashing noise was, or her trying to pull the collar off over her head and getting wedged with it half in her mouth (as she did yesterday; Tuesday she managed to pull it off entirely and give her stitches a good tug).

But really, this post is just an excuse to include a cute picture I took, in which she looks like a future space cat from the 1960s.

Post-op smidger

Rory went to the vet yesterday for her op. I haven't put a female pet through a spay since we had Layla, so I wasn't quite prepared for just what a major operation it is. Unlike bloke animals, where everything's on the outside and just gets whipped off fairly summarily (I was sent home with a buster collar for Milo, but he never needed it and never wore it), the smidge has to wear a collar for the next ten days, and her side is all shaved and has a small but deep scar on it, because everything has been taken out. This will be difficult, because her favourite way of getting downstairs is to climb between the bannisters, which she currently can't do.

The good news is that she bears us no ill will, and was up and about and eating and bumping into everything and sleeping on my lap again yesterday evening like a good 'un. Now I just need to look up the best way to wash her, or she will get manky and be upset. She's a fanatically clean cat, and even loves her comb. It will be hard for her not to be able to get at herself. Having said that, the inside of her collar is spotless.

Now Mister M and I and the fish are the only gendered animals left in the house.

Hot Dogs by Himself

When Queenie came home at Christmas, she and Himself arrived like the Magi, bearing gifts. A suitable book, the most excellent note cards (I keep opening up the box and just looking at them; I may never send them, they are too nice), a six-pack of Monkey beer, and a jar of home-made relish, courtesy of Himself.

This evening, this cold and rainy and miserable evening, I decided that the time had come to scoff the relish. So I took the weiners out that I had bought for Mister M, and I grilled them along with the veggie sossies I bought for myself. I also fried up some mushrooms and two types of onion. Then I split some hot dog buns and opened up the jar of relish Himself had made for us.

I was expecting it to be good, but I wasn't quite prepared for just how good it was. Sweet and crunchy. Everything a weiner could want. Of course, now we both have pains from inhaling the hot dogs so fast.

Thanks to Himself for brightening up a rotten winter evening. NOM NOM NOM.

Salsa!

I have just booked my mother and myself into a ten-week salsa/aerobics class, because I like dancing and I like the idea of being able to go to a dance class where I don't need a bloke.

Also, I am a fatass.

It might be fun. Right?

Birthday wishes

Wishes for happy birthdays go out to palzors Myles and Andrew today. Myles is one of several people I know who turn 39 this year. Next year is going to be busy with HUEG parties, I imagine.

Right Myles, right?

Andrew turns 23 again today. Bless him.

What cool presents did you get?

I got some cool things this year, such as the Solio, which is attached to the kitchen window as we speak, soaking up any piece of direct sunlight that happens to pass by. I also got this Cary Grant DVD box set, which is a thing of wonder, and this Radley handbag, which I have wanted very much ever since I first saw it some months ago.

Funny thing, I never cared about handbags before in my life. I mean, I like a nice handbag, but I never cared about brand names before Radley came into my life. I love the shape of them, and yes, they have a little dog.

I got two books only, but man, there's no Cecilia Ahern books here. Columbo gave me a book about Pinter, and Queenie gave me a book that I can only imagine must have screamed my name when she saw it. Fair play to her for listening, I am looking forward to it immensely.

Edited to add: I also got some cool jewellery from ComedyB (please don't rob my house, thks). If you are a chap, and you're thinking about buying jewellery for a lady, you could do worse than take ComedyB with you. He has good taste in the bauble area (see what I did there?).

Happy new year, everyone

I know that January 1, 2008, is a couple of days away still, but the new year always seems to me to kick in properly after Stephen's Day, because that's when I want to tidy the house and take the tree down and examine the presents I got and make resolutions to Be Better Next Year and so on.

Looking back at this year's blog entries, I see that I read only something like 20 books this year, and some of them I didn't even blog! (How ever will my four readers negotiate their local book emporia without my recommendations?) In 2008, I resolve to do better. Here are my firm resolutions for next year:

1. Get my week's work done in five days.
The success of all my other resolutions depends on this one. For too long I have spent hours in the middle of the day dossing about and accomplishing nothing at all beyond watching television, and not even good television. This is all fine and good for a couple of months, but it's nothing to base a long-term lifestyle on, so it must stop.

2. Read 50 books.
Last year's book-related resolution was based around purchasing. "Buy no more new books until you've read all the ones in the house," I believe it said. Many people, quite rightly, predicted the abject failure of this resolution, because obviously everybody with even a passing interest in the written word bloody well loves buying books, and I am no exception. Strangely, refusing to allow myself the relief of buying more books seemed to act as a barrier between me and my existing books, so that I came to resent them and chose to ignore them, instead of reading them, which is what I should have been doing. Now I will go back to the easier resolution of reading 50 books in the year. Also, I am introducing a sub-resolution, which is this:

2a. Donate three books a month to Oxfam.
Read or unread, three books a month are going into the shop. Which, of course, allows me to buy more books. Neat, I think.

3. Volunteer regularly at something again.
I spent a few Sundays in the fair trade shop coming up to Christmas, and it was pretty good. I'd like to do some regular volunteering again, if only to get me out of the house once a week. I notice that I also made this resolution last year, and spectacularly failed to keep it. I blame this on the fact that I had not been out of the voluntary sector long enough to miss it at that stage, whereas now I believe I can legitimately have a stab at it.

4. Write a new novel.
For the first time in about seven years, I was without a novel to work on in 2007. I must get a new one. Admittedly, novels for me are a bit like those endless knitting projects that some people engage in, which involve a massive tangle of wool and needles in the corner of a room, to be poked at only on occasion and never, ever finished, but they are satsifying to work on and fun to think about on long walks with the dogs. God, I hope they hurry up and finish the foot bridge so I can get away from the beach with its tedious other walkers and back into the fields where few other people go.

Um, that's it. There are, as usual, no self-improvement promises in here, no getting fit or learning a new language or being nicer to my fellow humans or anything. It's pointless to pretend that I would ever do any of those things. At least some of the resolutions I've outlined above have a vague chance of succeeding.

Queuing for Beginners

Joe Moran's book is a series of short essays on various aspects of the daily routine of the office worker, laid out in roughly chronological order. He gives you a breezy history of commuting to work, having meetings, taking a smoke break, going for lunch, having an after work pint, eating dinner, watching telly, and going to bed, and gives you a taster of some of the theories that have been advanced concerning the sociological and psychological significance of each of these routines and rituals. What's not to like?

Frankly, there's nothing not to like (my employers would love that double negative). It's a highly enjoyable book, a quick but immensely satisfying read, and it's got my favourite thing in it: a nice bibliography compiled BY THE AUTHOR in case you want to read some more about any of these theories or specific histories. It's got bits of architectural, industrial design, and communications theories in it, as well as broader theories about communal living and post-war economic history. Fun stuff.

Blue light special

It may surprise keen readers to know that, when it comes to Christmas festoonery, I prefer things to remain on the tasteful side. However, I can still understand many of the more outrageous choices of my fellow estate residents. I can see that there is a place for giant inflatable Santys that ho ho ho all night long and take up the entire front lawn. I can even see the point (kind of) of the ripples of petit mal-inducing flashing white lights.

But even I don't understand what makes anyone say, "honey, this Christmas, let's have our house look like the BMI check-in desk at Heathrow".

It's beginning to look a lot like...

Today our first Christmas card arrived, from Adrian and Noelle and Lyra.

Now Ghostbusters is on the telly.

Truly the festive season has arrived.

(Note, while looking for a photo with which to decorate this post, I came across this site, which has a story about Christmas cards as war time propaganda in World War II. V. interesting.)

Breaking Master and Commander news

In a recent comment to me, Ian asks if I've seen the new covers for the books. I offer you an example of one here.

Ian reckons these are aimed at the kind of people who read Sharpe books. I reckon they're aimed at GURLZ, because they've removed the ships from the covers and replaced them with people in historical dress, which is what GURLZ like.*

What do you reckon?

Edited later to add:

I am repulsed by these covers, and I think I understand why. Because they remind me (deliberately, I'm sure, as I've said) of the covers for the Philippa Gregory books I read. So I feel like they're being marketed in a reductive fashion that fails to take their true greatness into account.

I realise that this is completely idiotic, given that I am exactly, not just the type of, but the actual woman who reads historical fiction. But Patrick O'Brian books don't have romps and racy sex scenes in them. And, well, you wouldn't understand.


*Oh my god, I'm GURLZ. Jesus, I hate it when I fit a demographic. I hate it even more when marketing people try to sell me things after I've already discovered them for myself.

Imperium

The lady who owns the apartment where we stayed in Rome suggested I read this book before going there so as to give myself a bit of a background into the operation of the city during the late Republican period. Having read Pompeii and quite enjoyed it, I gave it a go.

It's the story of Cicero's rise to the position of consul (hate to give it away, but then, unless you're even more ignorant about classical civilization than I am, which would take some doing, then you already know that) and features much chat about, well, legal affairs in Rome in the late Republican period. Overall, I found the central narrative a little forced, which could be partly down to the character of Cicero. True, he was a great orator, many of whose speeches and ideas about manners have stood the test of time, but as a main character in a novel, he's a little flawed. Or, to be more exact, as a main character in the hands of a professional journalist turned novelist, he's a little flawed. A really good novelist could make you root for him, but Harris never quite manages to get across much about him other than his ambition and the fact that he's not quite as bad as some, but that's really only because he doesn't directly kill anyone. Even in the excellent telly series Rome, he comes over as a bit of an effete eejit most of the time, who can't quite figure out which side is going to come out on top at any time because nobody tells him anything.

However, you can't fault the detail here, or the feeling of being immersed in the city of the time. When we actually went to Rome, it all felt far more familiar, and I had a much clearer picture of how the society of the place worked. And so, let me recommend this book to you as a crash course in Roman history if you're going there on holidays. Then you too can stand in front of the temple of Vesta and think of Cicero having an argument with his wife where he accuses her sister of being "more vestal than virgin" (this argument probably did not actually happen).

Post Captain and HMS Surprise

I can't believe the last book I blogged about was way back in September. I really haven't been doing much reading of late, which I suppose is pretty rubbish of me, and what little time I have spent reading has been partly taken up with re-reading Patrick O'Brian books.

Amusingly, I had my copy of Post Captain with me when on holidays and was able to pull it out of my bag when a conversation about Patrick O'Brian came up, leading my pal Dave to wonder if I maybe carry the entire series with me everywhere I go. Of course I don't, that would be a bit mental. But if you had to carry two, I think these would be the two I'd take. First of all, there's plenty of fun adventures by sea in them, with some beautifully written and quite tense battles even if, like me, you have some difficulty with nautical jargon.

Second of all, these are the books that kind of made me fall in love with Stephen rather than Jack. Yes, I know he's not a great catch. He's kind of funny looking and wears a weird wool suit. He is a laudanum addict and a man who loves nothing more than prescribing a slime draught or a yummy purgative, just to teach you a lesson about drinking. He's also not exactly steady on his feet a lot of the time and will, if left to his own devices, eat nothing but bread rubbed with garlic for days on end. He would probably also dissect your granny if you left her alone with him.

On the other hand, he plays Boccerini on the cello and speaks Portuguese, Irish, Latin, Catalan, Spanish, French, Arabic, and a smattering of Urdu. He's funny and smart and ferociously loyal. He's a really good intelligence agent, and an amazing naval surgeon (wouldn't look at you for under ten guineas on land, though). He is a keen naturalist who can sit and stare at birds or beetles for hours on end, and he will walk all day and night to get somewhere he wants to go, or just to have a think.

He is also, somewhat scarily and surprisingly, handy with a pistol. In fact, he's more than handy: he's deadly. He is the kind of man who can fight a duel with someone and then, when they shoot him, he can take the bullet out himself.

Jack, on the other hand, is merely the kind of man who can whip a convoy of East India Company ships into fighting shape, rescue his best friend from torture, get his own ship's company firing two broadsides in under two minutes, and get a beautiful woman to fall in love with him despite him having no money at all from one minute to the next.

Really, who needs new books when you can re-read ones you already love?

Rome

I have added photos of our trip to Rome in early November. It's fast becoming one of my favourite things to do, this going to a European city in November for a week. I had loads of things I wanted to say about Rome, but there's just too much of it. So, let me recommend a few things very briefly.

First, we stayed here. The lady who owns the apartment is a very friendly American lady, and the apartment is where she actually used to live, so it's got a proper "someone lives here" feel about it, rather than the more usual "it's too small to actually live in, so I'll rent it out to tourists" feel that you usually get. That said, it really only sleeps two people. However, the location is fantastic. We walked everywhere from here; the only time we got the bus was when we were going to the Villa Borghese. We also ate in a bunch of places that our apartment lady recommended, and they were all very good.

My favourite places to eat and drink were here, which does amazing fried artichokes with salt and pepper; here, where we ate fantastic pizza on a Saturday afternoon and watched trendy Roman people go about their well-dressed Saturday; La Scala, which is in Trastevere as well and does the most amazing orange risotto; and this cafe, which does the strangest sour/sticky sweet coffee you ever tasted, in a beautiful 1950s bar.

We also availed ourselves of a private three-hour walking tour, which can be booked by talking to the lady who runs the apartment and brought us to the Forum by a route we never would have thought of by ourselves and which helped us to make a lot more sense of the layout of the ancient city than we would have got by other means. So I would recommend that too, if you've much of an interest in the ancient times.

(I also really liked the dog park in the Villa Borghese, and the cat sanctuary among the temples in the Largo Argentino.)

It is exhausting, though, and really, really crowded. There are people everywhere, all the time, and there are always mopeds up your arse and cars trying to squeeze past you on the narrow streets, and there are no footpaths and everything's cobbled, which sounds lovely but means you have to watch your step. So if you're going, you need to build in some rest time during the day.

Nanowrimo 2007

I didn't do this in the end. I had done no prep and I had no story and no characters which, despite the cheery insistence of the organizers of the event, is actually something of a problem when you want to write a novel. Or it is if your idea of the kind of novel you can write in 30 days is (for some inexplicable reason) somewhat more consistent than one consisting of random pirate attacks or alien autopsies or cats called Greymilliker or whatever people fill their Nano novels with (she said dismissively, as if the reason for her failure to write anything this year was to do with lofty ideals of artistic merit rather than the sad fact that she spends all day watching telly and entertaining her cats with things made of feathers).

Also, last year the November holiday was spent in Paris, where there were fewer sights that we simply had to get out and see than there are in Rome, so there was more time to sit around in cafes and write. Try sitting around in cafes in Rome and you are liable to have the coffee snatched out of your hand by feral pigeons or be knocked to the ground by some wide boy on a moped.

Moreover, I'm a little tired of the Nanowrimo people constantly asking for money to keep the whole enterprise going, as if there weren't enough completely free forums on the Internet where people can meet and chat and update word counts and so on at some kind of reasonable processing speed. I'm sorry that your dotcom era dream of runnng this festival instead of having a job isn't working out to be quite as lucrative as you had hoped, guys, but the only reason I ever felt good about giving you money was because you were prepared to give some of that to projects to build libraries for children in Vietnam. Now you're not even doing that, having decided to concentrate on your "young writers" program instead, which I'm afraid I just see as an attempt by you to build brand awareness in American youth so as to secure your pensions.

Wow, I'm grumpier than I thought.

I am tired.

Teh Festival of Teh Bangers

We had kids round to the house this evening for Hallowe'en, as so often happens at this time of the year. One of the groups of kids had two Spidermen in it. "Is one of you evil Spiderman?" I asked.
"No," said the oldest kid in the group, "evil Spiderman wears black. He's Spiderman 1 and he's Spiderman 2."

During the ad break for Corrie, I noticed...

... that Peelers seems a strange product name for an Irish cheese company to use. Nevertheless, Calvita Peelers are now available.

Also, I know my house is never exactly clean, but the women in the Cillit BANG!!!! adverts are right mingers. Some of those stoves are positively unhygienic.

Alexander

Mother of god, what a mess of a film. I'm not even sure I can wtch it all the way through. The acting is awful, the story is all over the place, and Colin Farrell both looks and sounds ridiculous. He looks like Club Tropicana era George Michael, and sounds awkward, as if he's putting on a fake Irish accent. Don't talk to me about Val Kilmer. Woejious. I still like his horse, though.

New nemesis

You'll be glad to know that I have a new nemesis, because no dog walk is complete without a certain level of tension. While they're building the footbridge, it's difficult for me to access the fields up around Mosney, so I no longer get to see my arch nemesis, The English Guy With the White Van Who Has the Dog That Attacks Other Dogs On Sight Yet Is Not Kept On a Lead.

Luckily, I can now direct my dislike toward The Woman Who Walks Her Boxer By Driving Up And Down the Beach in Her Giant SUV While the Dog Runs Behind. The dog is perfectly nice, which is fortunate, because periodically it gets tired chasing her giant car and decides instead to play with whoever it finds on the beach, because it is lonely and sometimes needs a rest. Today it followed me as far as the main road, and I had to walk back down to the beach with it and kind of shoo it off. She was parked a good way off, or I would have said something to her. Silly cow.

Majority of people satisfied with their health care experience?

For some reason I can't find the link to the actual story from this morning's news, but I seem to remember waking up to the seven o'clock news to be told that the Taoiseach, although sorry for poor Susie Long, nevertheless wanted to remind people that a recent survey revealed that most people are happy with the care they receive in the health service.

I would like to remind the Taoiseach that this survey was carried out on Irish people, who are notorious for bitching to one another about what shitty service they're receiving in a shop/restaurant/public service, and then when asked directly by someone in authority "is everything alright?" invariably say "yes, everything's grand".

This just in...

Anne Enright is IRISH! And she won the Booker Prize! And she's IRISH!

God bless her, your honour. With her IRISHNESS. God bless her.

Theatre Festival fun

Yesterday I took in the last two shows of my theatre festival experience for this year. I did a lot better than last year, because I actually managed to see almost half of the shows for which I bought tickets, as opposed to last year, when I think I saw maybe two plays, largely because of medication-related illness. This year, I managed to miss plays due to bus not coming, traffic being bad on match day, being ill with an incredibly bad cold and deciding I just couldn't sit through four hours of Eugene O'Neill.

All of what I did see was excellent, though. I will get around to reviewing them all in depth (I bet you can't wait) at a later date, but for now, here's the list.

Radio Macbeth in the Project: I always enjoy the Project, and it has the best seating of all the venues I went to, for me anyway. Nice, straight-backed seat, banquette style so that if it's full you can all budge up, but if it's not so full you can spread out a bit, as a kind of reward for supporting less commercial theatre.

Fragments in the Tivoli: Amusingly, the Tivoli seems to be playing a Beckett-style joke on audiences with its seating. It looks very comfortable on the face of things, being proper old-style cinema seats, but then, when you try to sit down, you realise that there is so little leg room that you have to scrunch yourself right up into a ball and wedge your legs firmly into the back of the person in front. Neither Queenie nor Mister M would have been able to sit through this show, and I almost didn't manage it either. If it had been longer than an hour, there would have been trouble.

Road to Nowhere at the O'Reilly Theatre, Belvedere College: Functional seating, but no points to whatever bright spark decided to book a show that would attract an audience of seniors (many of whom would, obviously, have mobility issues ranging from the slight to the severe) into an auditorium where the toilets are on the second floor.

Saturday picks up after a rubbish beginning

My friend called me this morning to ask if I would go to the theatre with her this evening, because she couldn't get a babysitter and anyway there were sporting events her Mister wanted to watch. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what's known as foreshadowing. Sporting events, see?

At first I thought, well, it's a long way into town, but then I thought, fuck it, what else am I going to do with my Saturday evening? And it's always good to see her. So I said yes, I'd love to.

Cut to me sitting in traffic at the Port Tunnel (because I decided to really treat myself and drive into town, you see) for half an hour because yes, as you all remembered but I forgot, Ireland are playing (I want to say Germany?) in Croke Park this evening. So I had to phone friend, make a highly illegal Uey on the M1, and head home again.

Ah well. After that rubbish start, Saturday evening is actually picking up. There are certain advantages to Mister M not being here. Guilt free popcorn, for a start. With butter and maple syrup on. Then there's the fact that the other half bottle of red wine, the half I didn't put in the chilli, is still there for me to drink. And there is Strictly Come Dancing on the telly and two good films on the expensive bit of telly. And one of them, even though I've seen it before, has Paul Bettany in. Well, you can't ask for much more on a Saturday night in, can you? It's almost as if somebody 6,000 miles away was watching out for me.

Trish, what have you been doing all day?

I've been staring at this lady, as have all my Internet chums. You can either see her going clockwise or anticlockwise to begin with, and then you can make her swap and go the other way.

You'll also be glad to know that she has nipples. You can look at them.

Michael Clayton

Last night Mister M and I did something we never do. No, not that. The other thing. Yes, we went to the cinema. We were in town and it was a crappy night, so we figured, why not?

We saw that film Michael Clayton, which has that bloke in it who women want to be with and men want to be like (apparently). In it, he plays a fixer for a law firm who has to clean up the mess left behind when his friend (and, it seemed to me, mentor) has a bipolar episode while working on a really long-running class action suit against a major chemicals corporation. With hilarious results. Well, no. Actually slightly predictable results, really.

Some things about this film were just great. George Clooney, for one. He just looked grumpy and out of sorts throughout the entire film; his performance reminded me of Bruce Willis's in Twelve Monkeys, as if he had been given strict instructions not to do The Look, or The Twinkle, or any one of a number of little things he does to try to exude charm. I liked his relationship with his son, and indeed his family as a whole. It seemed kind of normal. I also liked Tom Wilkinson, because who doesn't? Also the overall seventies downbeat nature of the film is great. It's not funny, there are no jokes, there's no snappy dialogue, it just tells the story and that's kind of it.

However, it's nowhere near as good as everybody says it is. It's simply one of those films that is as good as films should be. Tilda Swinton's character has a major flaw, which is telegraphed from miles away. There are several things that happen that kind of don't make any sense. Above all, the character of Michael Clayton himself is a textbook example of told-not-shown.

I don't want to undersell it, though. I certainly enjoyed it and it was in no way stupid or too long or annoying in any way. It's just that maybe it was slightly oversold to me.

Also, whatever you do, don't go to the official site looking for photos to put on your blog post. Jesus, talk about overdesigned.

Queenie update

Queenie is out of the pound and safe.

Lord Flashheart to the rescue

Last night I was finishing up some work for the week and I had a bit of a freak out. Not to do with volume of work or nature of work, but to do with the actual content of the journals and magazines I was reading. This week, two gems stood out for their utterly depressing content against the usual background noise of economics and politics and recommendations for acceptable levels of violence to use against offenders and rehabilitation of the massive U.S. prison population. One was a serious academic journal called Child Abuse and Neglect, the title of which I'm sure says it all. The second culprit was Onearth, which had its usual litany of ochón ochón the sky is falling articles, including a big article about bitumen extraction in Alberta--cheery stuff, I'm sure you agree.

Then, last night, I read this article in the New Statesman and I just got really upset by it. It was the last straw. So I left the work unfinished and came downstairs to immerse myself in the harmless world of movie trailers. And that's where I got my first look at Clive Owen being Sir Walter Ralegh. Look at him! And... AND! as if that wasn't enough, he's on a ship in one clip. You can see it too!

Winter is coming in

It's dark and cold. The sun isn't coming up till 7.30am and it's fecking off again around 7pm. Obviously, then, the time has come to fill our boxes with straw, write our names on our shells, and go asleep till next spring.

To that end, Mister M and I have made some Important Purchases, namely:

1) a 40" flat-screen high-definition television that looks something like the monolith from 2001 turned on its side
2) a high-definition satellite subscription, including movies
3) a new, luxurious sofa bed that will provide our sitting room with a more comfy main couch and provide our house with an extra bed should you wish to come and watch things that are highly defined

This is especially good news for me because Mister M is going away to the Mother Ship for two weeks soon and I will be on my own, so it's only proper that I should be able to have people out and offer them a place to sleep or, at the very least, watch television on my own in comfort and have somewhere in the sitting room to fall asleep should I decide (which I will, at least once) that going to bed is too much trouble.

ComedyB runs a marathon

So, my brother is running the Dublin City Marathon this year. He is hoping to raise €5,000 for Console, who provide counselling services for people bereaved by suicide.

If you care about people who are bereaved by suicide, or you would like to feel like you're betting on a really slow race that you simply can't win, perhaps you'd like to sponsor him.

Once a month

I've realised that I can't save all the dogs or cats, but once a month I send money to a rescue to take one out of the pound and kennel it for a couple of nights (or get it vaccinated, or whatever).

Usually I pick dogs that look like my dogs or I think have a good chance of getting homed or dogs I wished I owned. This month, though, I picked Queenie, who was surrendered to the pound in Dunboyne. I hope now that there is a rescue space for her.

Of course, it's bad news when there's so many dogs in the pound that they start using names starting with Q.

One-bus-an-hour land

The problem with living in such a land is that if your bus doesn't show up (which I'd forgotten was even a possibility, it's so long since I depended on OBAH; not since I lived with my parents, I think) then you can't go and do whatever it was you were going to do all those miles away. So I missed Gavin's show, despite having bought a ticket and secured a pal to come with me.

The moral of the story is: don't arrange to go into Dublin on All-Ireland Final day, because public transport is all screwed up, and you can't even decide to take the car in, because there won't be anywhere to park it.

Culture Night in Dublin

Last night was Culture Night in Dublin, which meant that instead of Temple Bar crawling with hen and stag parties, it was heaving with oldies (like me) creeping about peeking in the windows of various establishments to see if there was anything free happening.

There was for sure free stuff happening in my old place of employment, which had live music from the bands of various volunteers, and a reading by up-and-coming author Kevin Barry, who gave a splendid reading of a story from his collection There are Little Kingdoms and donated some copies to the shop to sell.

One really nice thing was that I met a volunteer there who I first knew when he worked as a security guard at a Dublin radio station I used to frequent. He has since retired, and last year his wife died so he decided to start doing some volunteer work. He chose the shop I used to work in because, well, I used to work there. Now he's there all the time. I don't know how the guys who run the shop feel about that, but it was really nice to run into him. He actually thanked me for the fact that he found the shop, because he loves working there. It was very touching.

Tomorrow night I am going to Gavin Kostick's somewhat insane project for which he learned off all of Heart of Darkness. I am greatly looking forward to it, kind of.

The Reason Why

So, there were these two guys who were both dicks who really hated each other. However, they were incredibly brave and liked to ride their horses. And one day they were in a war in Crimea, where one of them lived in a tent and one of them lived on a yacht, and when they were given the order to charge one place at the side of a valley, they instead ran all the way down the valley, right into the enemy guns*. They both survived, but many of the people they took with them did not.

And then Lord Lucan said to Lord Cardigan "did you think I would leave you dying, when there's room..."

NO, that is not what happened!

The Reason Why is another amazing, tense, funny, descriptive, beautifully written narrative history from our heroine of history, Cecil Woodham Smith. It's a great book, which you might have been put off in the past because you don't care about military history and so your eye just glided over the pictures of beautifully turned out British cavalrymen on the front of it. In fact it's a wonderful social history that explains much about what the hell went wrong with the British army. It's great.

*except the slightly less mad of the two of them stopped halfway and said "bugger this, this is madness" and stopped.

Must get her book about Florence Nightingale now.

The real New Year

Everyone knows that the new year really starts in September, when the new academic year begins. There is no reason for me to feel this way anymore, given that I haven't taken an academic course of any kind since 1992, but I still get restlessness around this time of the year. Maybe it's a way of fending off the approaching darkness and cold of winter, maybe it's just that, apart from the two-week trip to Canada, I went nowhere and saw nobody all this dismal summer long. I don't know.

In any case, I have made New Year's resolutions for the academic year 2007-2008. I've bought tickets to things in the Dublin Theatre Festival, for a start. I said last year that I wasn't going to do this again, because things then start to happen which prevent me from going to the events for which I have booked tickets, but then, that's no kind of attitude, so I've bought tickets and I'm going to go (of course, I'm already in trouble with the tickets I've booked for Long Day's Journey Into Night, but that's another story).

I've also booked an Italian course for me and Mister Monkey, which will take me into town every Tuesday night for ten weeks.

And I'm going to Amsterdam.

And we're going to Glasgow.

And we're going to Rome.

It is a busy time, on paper at least. The real challenge will be to actually attend all the things I've paid for.

The chews that ooze? Are you people for real?

Mars have introduced a new sweet. It's part of the Starburst (nee Opal Fruits) range, and is called the Starburst Choozer. First of all, when are we going to get tired of "z" instead of "s" as a signifier for what is young and hip? Second of all, the, um, slightly menstrual quality of the dollop of "ooze" that falls on the man in the ad is enough to turn a person's stomach, and the fact that this is then followed by the policeman sticking his finger in the ooze and licking it off, well, it kind of makes you hope to avoid the ad altogether when you're having your tea.

Finally, the tag line. The chews that ooze? Sores and spots ooze. Dead union members strapped to radiators ooze. Sweets shouldn't ooze. It's not right.

The world's worst icecream man

The weather forecast had suggested that yesterday might be a nice day, so our friends R and D and their children came out to visit us. In the end, the weather wasn't that great, but we went down the beach anyway, and for a couple of hours we were those people you see in old photos of Blackpool and Bournemouth and Courtown, standing on the beach in our sunglasses despite there being no evidence of sun.

A developed this great game with me where he scooped muddy sand out of one of the little streams along the beach and presented it to me as icecream, but right before I took it in my hand, he would throw it on the ground. This worked out well for me, as it goes, because it meant I didn't actually have to eat the icecream, and we got to shout at each other for a while, which kids love (even if their parents hate it. I am a bad influence).

We also brought Milo and Cody with us, and A held Milo's lead all the way down and all the way home again. I was very proud of both A and Milo. Milo walked politely beside A, didn't try to pull him, and periodically checked back to make sure we were close behind. A held the lead, told Milo to wait when we got to roads to be crossed (which Milo actually did) and patted Milo on the head when he was good. He is a born pack leader. Which is good, because he has no future in retail at all.

Kitten sadness

We recently experienced a kitten tragedy here in the Monkey House. The lovely ginger kitten who was going to go and be Dweezil's special friend died. I was putting eye drops in his eye and he squirmed away from me and fell on the floor. On the way down, he hit his head off the edge of a box, and by the time he got to the floor he was spasming frantically and was clearly not well; he died within a few minutes.

Looking back on it from the relatively safe distance of a few days, I realise that for all that I make fun of Mister M and his freakish inability to cry, it is a useful skill to have in a situation like this. I, on the other hand, go completely to pieces.

I mean, I know he was just a kitten and not a person or anything, but it was pretty awful.

In good kitten news, though, Rory is a little trouper. She's sweet and affectionate and fun. A good kitten catch.

Washer toss

In a recent post, Queenie describes some games of washer toss that we played in her back garden while on holidays. Washer toss is a great game, for many reasons.

One: It requires some special equipment that you can't necessarily just throw together yourself (i.e. something more complicated than just a ball, or just drawing a chalk line on the ground) so the game has a sense of occasion to it.

Two: It can be played in various states of inebriation, by people of both genders, of all ages, and of varying levels of fitness.

Three: It invites, and indeed practically requires, trash talking of the opposition in order to put them off their stride. In this regard it has one great advantage over other games, which is that the person who stands beside you throughout the game is a member of the opposition, allowing your trash talking to be as subtle as you like.

Four: It combines elements of skill and the absolute flukiness usually associated with darts or poker.

Five: The ground you're playing on doesn't need to be level, or grass, or in any particular condition, as long as you've got a clear shot between the two boxes.

It's a great game. You should all play it. There's a nice man in Nova Scotia you can order your sets from, I understand.

Linking places and books

The Secret River and The Songlines will always be linked in my mind with the holiday in Halifax on which I read them. I'm sorry now that I didn't take a picture the day we were in the Paperchase coffee shop and the heavens opened to douse Halifax in some of the heaviest rain I've ever seen. The windows were open and we sat in comfortable chairs, watching the rain, watching the other customers watching the rain, listening to some eejits prattling on about jobs in the media (but coded looks between myself and Queenie managed to shut their asses up fast), watching some shifty-looking bloke who looked very much like he was about to start robbing things any minute, and, crucially, reading. We had just been to the cavernous second-hand bookshop that is Doull's, where I had picked up, hey! who would have guessed? a book about the whaleship Essex. That's where I got The Songlines as well.

It's not always bad when it rains on holidays.

The Songlines

It turns out that if you suggest to Mister Monkey that you would be interested in reading a book about Australian Aborigines, he thinks you should read Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines. He is not alone. I'm here to tell you, however, that if you read this book because you want to learn about Aboriginal culture, you'll be disappointed. If, on the other hand, you are reading it because you want to read a book in which a man tries very hard to make sense of the living conditions of some people who refuse to fit in with the reality that's been forced upon them, and also tries to construct a grand theory of travelling, you will be enlightened and find much enjoyment.

The book, which was written in 1987, tells the story of Chatwin's attempt to learn about Aboriginal songlines by going to Australia and meeting with leaders of Aboriginal groups. During his stay, he is trapped by bad weather on a reservation for some time and goes through his notebooks to try, it seems to me, to come up with an explanation for why people like walking, and why people (in particular Westerners) seem to be so hell-bent on forcing their realities onto other cultures. Originally when I was reading this, I tried to explain away these disjointed fragments of personal recollection and anthropological theory as Chatwin's attempt to sing his own songline, but now I'm not sure. I could imagine that you would, having spent time in the company of Aborigines, try to construct a romantic history of your own. Who is not seduced by the idea of these people, living the same way for 20,000 years, living through songs and stories and hunting and taking only what they need from the land around them? You'd have to be a hard person not to fall in love with words and concepts like Dreamtime and Dreaming, or the idea of having your own songline. Of course you'd love to have something like that for yourself.

I have to conclude, though, that it really was a grand theory of walking he was after in the muddled middle section of the book. The ever-useful Queenie, who has read Nicholas Shakespeare's biography of Chatwin, told me that Chatwin wrestled with that section of the book for over a year, and finally had to let it go as it was because he couldn't hammer it all into a single coherent strand. I think, if you read Jared Diamond, you might find some of the legacy of Chatwin's attempts in there.

Outside the section on walking and travelling, Chatwin's own experience in Australia are amazing. I won't tell you any of them, but if you ever read about the romance of kangaroo hunting and think "I'd like to do that", I think you'll be surprised to see what's changed about it.

By the way, I would still like to read a comprehensive book about the Aborigines, if anyone knows one.

The Secret River

On holidays at Queenie's place, I read this book by Australian writer Kate Grenville. Queenie recommended it to me from her personal stash (in fact, she more than recommended it to me, she left it on the shelves in the room where Mister Monkey and I were sleeping, such is her attention to guest comfort details). It's a fine piece of historical fiction about a Thames boatman who commits a crime and is transported to Australia.

It's got some great elements of the best historical fiction in it. First, it's got lots of stuff about boats and rivers and the sea in it. Second, it is, as far as I can remember the details of Robert Hughes's The Fatal Shore, pretty historically accurate. And third, it takes its mission as fiction more seriously than its mission as history; it follows the rough outline of the typical journey of the transported convict, but refrains from having the protagonist commit a crime once he gets to Australia, which would, of course, have seen him sent to Van Diemen's Land. You can tell at one point that she was thinking about it, because she talks about it almost longingly, but she steers away from it in the long run and heads for the more straightforward story of just exactly what was required of people to become successful in Australia in those days. It wasn't pretty.

In a weird way this book reminds me of Little House on the Prairie with its details of everyday life on the frontier, grubbing a living out of harsh lands, living hand to mouth. However, I don't think Laura Ingalls ever had to see the things that these people had to see. It's the first book I've ever read that came close to providing an explanation of just how people from Britain were willing to come across the sea and, frankly, slaughter a bunch of people who were just minding their own business in their own home. Desperation is a powerful thing.

The Boleyn Inheritance

This is the book where Philippa Gregory talks about Anne of Cleeves and Katherine Howard. Yet again, we see how shit it was to have to spend your time sucking up to Henry VIII (I have no idea how men managed to do this, it's not like they could pretend he was fabulously good-looking) and how all round rubbish it was to be a woman around this time.

I knew nothing about Anne of Cleeves or Katherine Howard before I read this, and I'm kind of assuming I'm in good historical hands with Gregory, so it is with some confidence that I can express amazement that Henry got away with this shit for the few years that he did. After he divorced Katherine of Aragon and then executed Anne Boleyn, he seems to have gone mental and more or less chewed women up and spat them back out again on a kind of conveyor belt. It didn't help that he was getting older and fatter and less able to hold up his end of the bargain as each wife went by, nor that his succession was so contentious that that everyone with an interest in the future of the kingdom appeared to be chucking women at him.

My respect for Anne of Cleeves is colossal, as it was for Katherine of Aragon. These were women who could easily have run countries in their own right (I'm not sure I'd necessarily have given Jane Seymour or Katherine Howard such a task), and Anne of Cleeves even managed an amicable divorce from the old git. Good for her.

Mutiny on the Globe

Narrative histories about whaleships, mutinies, and shipwrecks are ten a penny, and this one has elements that are familiar to those who've read other ones. Crazy guy thinks he can set up his own society but needs a ship's crew to get him to the right location, then, once he gets there, he kills everyone who's not in on his plan. Gradually, however, he ends up having to kill more and more people in a Richard III stylee.

This book has those elements.

What makes it interesting is what happens after the mutiny is over, which is that the ship fecks off, and two guys are left on an island in the middle of the Pacific with some potentially hostile natives. The book tells the story of how they were, essentially, kept as slaves by the people who lived on the islands, and how they lived there for several years before eventually being rescued by the U.S. Navy. It makes a nice change from being cast adrift in a rowboat and having to eat their shipmates, I suppose, but it does seem to have been incredibly hard work, especially as they could never really be sure they weren't going to be killed, and they were separated from each other almost all that time.

Ringworm!

Ringworm is one of those fun things that if you probably never have to cope with if you are not a) a parent b) a farmer c) a vet or d) someone who gets pets from rescues. Given that I fall firmly into category d), our house has ringworm again. It hasn't been vet confirmed yet, but ginger kitten is showing all the signs: he's got little raised scabs on the back of his neck and his hair is starting to fall out.

Annoyingly, we've run out of quarantine rooms, which means we have no way of separating him from Rory for the duration of the treatment (usually a month), so she'll probably get it too if she hasn't got it already. Luckily it's not very bad, and he is small enough to be wrestled into a bath, so we might not have the six-week ordeal that we had with Linus and Lucy or the four-week misery fest that was Killick's battle with ringworm. His was so bad that Mister M caught it from him.

Unluckily, it does mean another month of being careful about keeping an airlock between the kittens and the other house animals at all times, vaccuuming the house every day, changing my clothes every time I move between the kittens' room and the rest of the house, and having a shower every time I leave them.

It's a good thing they're cute.

Phear it part two for today

Even though we're not keeping him, here are some gratuitous kitten pictures of the ginger kitten. He is not staying, so do not get used to photos of him.

Phear it!

We have a new kitten. We decided when Dweezil was here on his holidays last week that really it's better if Linus has company, especially when we have to put him into kennels or anywhere like that. So I contacted a pet rescue lady and lo and behold, we have a new kitten.

She is approximately 12 weeks old and at the moment is upstairs in my office with her little friend, who is going to be the new kitten for Dweezil to be friends with in his house, but they have an eye infection so we're minding them both here. Our kitten is called Rory, and she is a long-haired tortoiseshell. I am trying very, very hard not to fall in love with her (mainly in case she turns out to be a prick), but it's very hard when she keeps licking my arm really hard to make milk come out of it (I assume that's what she's doing. It's hard to tell with cats) and just being absolutely the most beautiful cat that I, personally, have ever owned.

She could be a prick, though. It's too early to tell.